Five For Fri......Sunday....

Umm, yep. I'm a little late to the party. Better late, then never!

I've been doing lots of fun things in my classroom lately but always forget to take photos! I'm anxious to put pictures of kids and their work on my blog so I try to do what I can...

1. In Science, we are looking at life stages of living things. We drew our own life stages using the template below. Click on the images to get your own copy!

 

We are observing the growth of mealworms. I know. Not the cutest thing to watch grow but the kids LOVE it! We had to buy wood shavings and the mealworm larvae. We keep them in a little plastic container and feed them bits of carrot.

 

The picture below shows the larvae on the left and the pupa stage on the right. I think they look like little aliens...

2. We learned about homophones and made these adorable 'pair of pears' from Sarah Cooley's homophone packet.

3. I'm trying something different with my rotations this term. Monday and Tuesday I do 'Writers Workshop' rotations with 3 different levelled groups.

I don't run it like the typical Writers Workshop. I have three activities - Teacher Time, Handwriting/letter formation and Journal writing. For Teacher Time, I decide on a focus for the two days. It may be a genre, it may not. The past couple of weeks it has simply been 'stretching sentences' where we look at starting with a simple sentence, making it descriptive, then compound and complex (for those smart cookies).

My TBB (Teaching Buddy Bestie) in third grade came up with the most FABulous idea!

1. Write a word on the board for the 'theme' of a sentence. For example, I wrote 'beach'.

2. Tell the students they can write any sentence they'd like, as long as it is about that theme. Some will write simple sentences, some will write compound, etc.

3. Have them swap books and rate each other using the following: (1) They used a simple sentence. (2) They used a compound sentence. (3) They used a complex sentence.

4. As a group, discuss their sentences and provide feedback.

5. Students give books back and then get a chance to earn more 'points' by changing their sentence.

6. Swap back and rate books again.

4. At the end of last term, we did some reflection of the things we learned so far this year. We made these super cute ice-cream scoops. They look great hanging in the classroom. Click on the pictures to check them out.

5. I don't have a picture of this one, but to link with our Science we are going to be creating our own insects for Technology. My teaching partner's student teacher found this super fun YouTube clip to teach about the different parts of an insect. For some reason the YouTube clip isn't working through Blogger, so click on the image below to go to it :)

After we watched this, we go down on the carpet and created 'human insects'. As we revised the different parts of an insect, I had some student create that part with their bodies. There were many laughs and they had so much fun!

That's it! I'll hopefully be back soon with some more useful posts ;)